Being alive

Hope Ness

In the morning I take some time to stand amid the buckwheat, fully in bloom now, and listen to the murmur of countless bees and other insect pollinators. The bumblebees seem to be most prevalent, certainly most visible. Where they go when they’re not hear gathering nectar from dense proliferation of white, buckwheat flowers, I don’t know. I let them be, no pun intended, but I think a lot about the great danger posed to them and their buzzing friends by the widespread use of the most recent type of human-made pesticides, neonicotinoids, or neonics for short. Continue reading →

An RCMP officer with a big heart welcomes a migrant/refugee child to Canada last winter at an unofficial border crossing. Who can say this is wrong?

A few days of occasional, light showers, amounting to a scant 2.2 millimetres of rain is not yet enough to end the extended drought the Bruce Peninsula has been experiencing through the most critical period of the current growing season. But it’s better than nothing when your field crops and vegetables are in dire need of any amount of moisture they can get. Continue reading →

We took Mom’s ashes back to Toronto a few days ago, to Westminster Cemetery, to be buried with her birth mother Clara, her beloved aunts/sisters Bella and Lila, and her grandparents/adoptive parents, Thomas and Eliza, in the Thompson family burial site.

Our hope was they would all be put to rest and joined together in spirit at last. And if that finally is the purpose of my life, to facilitate a final spiritual resolution to the turmoil and unhappiness of their lives, to give them closure, then I am content. Continue reading →

The local store where I buy my Big Beautiful Boy’s dog food was fairly busy one morning earlier this week. Housed in an older building, the décor steeped in Canadian, farm-store heritage, it’s staffed and operated by folks who call you by name – or soon will, if you’re new. If they say, “have a nice day,” they really mean it.

Trees have a lot to tell us about the state of their world, and ours. They’re in trouble too.

That tough, old sugar maple clinging for dear life to a primordial rock up there by my barn, for example, has surely been through many a hard winter, summer drought, and other traumatic seasonal surprises. But this late winter/early spring, maple sap/syrup season must be one of the most challenging in its long history of stolid endurance. Continue reading →

“May you live in interesting times” is an ancient Chinese curse, made all the more effective, one imagines, by being so nicely understated. The full extent of the catastrophe that might befall the victim is left to their imagination.

Some, perhaps even many, might say we are currently living in the sort of “interesting times” that would meet the requirements of the curse, with real or potential, world-changing catastrophe shaping up or already running amok on several fronts.

Some of it gets plenty of news coverage, more than enough, you might say. The whole world has the proverbial ringside seat to the decline and fall of a great democracy, and the real threat that poses for every living soul on earth, and future generations. Vast news resources, traditional and new, are focussed on one madman’s every troubling word, tweeted or otherwise.

Meanwhile, other urgently important news gets nowhere near the attention it needs and deserves. It appears somewhere below the actual and virtual fold in the headlines for a day or so, before being relegated to the archival back pages, out of mass-public sight, and mind.

That appears to be the routine fate of news reports about the latest studies into the unfolding effects of global warming and climate change. Such studies invariably express an urgent need for the world to take action to stop it from happening, or else “interesting times” shall be the inevitable consequence.

Such was the case again with coverage of the results of an “analysis” of declining oxygen levels in vast areas of the open oceans, as well as coastal areas. It was co-authored by 22 scientists and published early this month in the journal Science. Continue reading →

Like, for example, I just looked at the weather forecast for our area here in greater Hope Ness, and there’s no relief in sight for an end to the current deep freeze, and a lot more lake-effect snow. I ventured out onto the wind-swept Eastnor Flats to get some diesel fuel for the tractor, and I might as well have been at the North Pole. I understand it was almost as cold there.

(Note to Donald Trump who just tweeted sarcastically about the need for a little of that good, ol’ global warming: It IS about global warming, and climate change, throwing the longstanding stability of the jet stream out of wack. This is why parts of Alaska are warmer than Hope Ness, and maybe even Washington, D.C. for that matter. The science-based facts about it are just a few keys over from twitter, Dear Donald. Give it a read some time before tweeting the first ill-informed thing that comes to mind – and that’s putting it nicely.)

But getting back to why it’s no so easy to look on the bright side about the New Year: Continue reading →

Once I had a compass, in a manner of speaking: it was a figurative one, with a needle that mostly pointed to hope. Not all the time, mind you. Occasionally it pointed in the wrong direction, when I lost my way and ended up trapped in the negative continuum that happens when you make the wrong choice, or otherwise make a life-changing mistake. Takes a long time more often than not to break free and find your way back to a place where you can make a fresh start. Continue reading →